


Project Blessing

by beetle



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Apocalypse, Assassins & Hitmen, Breaking Conditioning, Character Death, Death, Falling In Love, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mission Fic, Plague, Science Fiction, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Time Travel, Tragic Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-08
Updated: 2014-04-08
Packaged: 2018-01-18 16:41:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1435474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beetle/pseuds/beetle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The mission was simple: Go back . . . and kill Aaron Blessing."</p>
<p>OR:</p>
<p>What happens when two unstoppable wills meet immovable, determined destiny. . . .</p>
            </blockquote>





	Project Blessing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Four_Nostril](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Four_Nostril/gifts), [Pyroperception](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pyroperception/gifts).



> Notes/Warnings: Written for the prompt: "Your main gay/lesbian character travels back in time exactly two hundred years. What happens?"
> 
> This is the most science-y piece I've ever written. I, like, read articles and Googled stuff to write it. Retroactively dedicated to two of the most science-y and smart people I know, Four_Nostril and Pyroperception, _well_ after the fact. I hope you'll like the science-y stuff and the character development, respectively and not mutually exclusively :-)

The mission was simple:

Go  _Back_ — _way_  Back—to before The ‘Phage . . . and kill Aaron Blessing.

#

The intel we had on Blessing’s life was sketchy—but then, we really didn’t need it to be detailed. We just needed to know where he was living a few years before the CDC finally informed the populace of the spread of The Nanophage. By which time it was, of course, too late. Blessing was long dead by that point, and only years of desperate reverse-engineering by the CDC and damned near every qualified scientist in the First World pointed at this heretofore unknown man as the creator of The ‘Phage . . . and its patient zero.

No, not much was known about him beyond the bare facts. But then, we didn’t need much, did we? All we needed was just enough to get one soldier in his vicinity to take him out.

I was that . . .  _soldier_. That  _assassin_.

 

The mission called for a sledgehammer, not a scalpel. Kill Aaron Blessing and destroy all his work on nanotechnology, if indeed, any had yet existed. Kill anyone that got in my way, or tried to continue or resurrect his work.

But the most important thing was Blessing. Everyone—everyone that was left on this emptied world—agreed that he had to die.

#

The night before they sent me Back, I spent wandering in the house Luka and I had shared for over ninety-seven years. That night was the first I’d been home in the years since the physical training and psychological conditioning that was supposed to make me a remorseless killer.

Everything was exactly as I’d left it, only dustier. The chandelier in the front hall—Luka’s pride and joy . . . he’d loved that thing like it was a baby—had cobwebs, but still worked when I flicked the switch near the door. Every floor, with the exception of the kitchen and front hall practically devoured sound because of the carpeting, which Luka had wanted. Whimsy or melancholy led me first to the library, which had been Luka’s workspace. The huge dry-erase board was still littered with multi-colored equations that might as well have been in Greek for all the sense I could make of them. Luka’s notebooks still lay where they’d fallen or where he’d dropped them, crammed from margin to margin and front to back in his tiny, anal print. . . .

I turned my back on the library almost as soon as I entered it, and made my way to the living room. More shades of Luka were to be seen there, from the interior design—Luka had loved masculine, baroque furniture and Oriental rugs, ornate fixtures and area lamps—to the few of his notebooks that had migrated from the library. Everything was the same and had been the same for nearly half a century. There was only one way in which I’d changed the house since he’d gone. . . .

Pictures of Luka adorned every wall and any flat surface that wasn’t meant for an ass or for feet. The whole house had been little more than a shrine to him since he . . . passed forty-three years ago. I’d used to spend days wandering the large old colonial, repairing what needed repairing on occasion, but mostly remembering and looking at the past. Looking at the time before Luka’s madness began to outpace the nanites that kept us all so damnably sane and alive. Before the chemicals those same nanites created to regulate our emotions and moods stopped being enough, as they had for so many of the few that remained.

Before Luka went and killed himself. . . .

I spent my last night in my past  _in my past_. Saying good-bye. I waited in the empty, cavernous abyss of a house for anything to happen. A breakdown. A catharsis. A _something_. But nothing came. Nothing happened. It wasn’t home anymore . . . _home_  had died with Luka

_Nothing_ was all I felt anymore, and even the nanites couldn’t change that. Since the conditioning had really gotten underway in earnest, I’d been hard put to feel anything other than grim satisfaction that I seemed to take to hand-to-hand combat and simula-kills like a fish to water.

At sun-up, I left the house that’d once been my home . . . mine and Luka’s. The Institute wasn’t a far walk. The house was even in their name, and though Luka, who had once been one of their preeminent experts on displacement theory, was dead, I, as his spouse, was allowed to stay on. Indeed, in a world with more homes than people to fill them, no one cared enough to bother about evicting one widower.

None of us, we immortal few, cared about anything, anymore, but The Project. Project Blessing.

#

I left that house with nothing but the clothes I’d arrived in and one perfect photograph of Luka. He’s smiling in it, sitting in the sun, head tipped back and eyes half-closed. I don’t remember what he was laughing at, or even taking the picture. But it seemed like the best way to remember him, rather than as a silent, melancholy ghost haunting our house for a decade before finally going ghost all the way.

I locked the door against intruders, as I had three years ago. But I’d never be back. Even if I’d felt inclined to return to a shrine to a man I remembered but could no longer feel in my heart except as an everlasting sense of loss, ache, and betrayal. Even if I’d felt inclined to return to a place that had slowly been becoming my tomb . . . I couldn’t. The trip Back was one way.

This good-bye was for keeps.

And if all went as planned, then . . . well, Luka, who’d been born a year after The Nanophage made the first news reports, might cease to be. He’d been one of the last of the Final Generation: the last children born to a populace rendered sterile by the very nanites that made them nearly immortal. I would, in all likelihood, never meet him. Never _love_ him.

I was certain it was for the best.

The needs of the many. . . .

The Institute wasn’t a far walk, at all.

#

I’d closed my eyes in a lab, surrounded by men and women whom I’d known for nearly a century but, at this point in my conditioning and at this point in humanity’s final inning, could only call colleagues. There’d been a needle-prick in my arm, a cool wash of numbness, then darkness a thousand times deeper than the comparative noon-day of having simply shut one’s eyes.

Then I was blinking and bolting upright from my prone position, like a man escaping the clutches of a nightmare.

I was in a garbage-littered basement of a house that I’d been reassured had stood empty for a number of years even before the ‘Phage. I knew the day and the approximate time.

But I was groggy and disoriented. Thanks to the Institute, my nanites had been successfully—painfully, and over many months—flushed from my system, so I wouldn’t contaminate Back with them. My mind and body didn’t have miniature robots tirelessly tending to it and keeping it clear and operating at maximal readiness, as it had since I was nine years old.

So, I lay there, staring at the shadows the sun made on the wall and waited for my head to clear. I thought of Luka for a while . . . then of nothing at all.

When my mind had sufficiently rebooted, I stood up slowly, but easily, from the dirty, dusty floor, and brushed off my vintage mid-twenty-first century clothing of khaki trousers, a cotton workshirt, tennis shoes, and a nylon windbreaker. Nearby was a  _backpack_ , an object which I remembered from my own distant childhood, that contained a Velcro wallet in which were credit cards, one photo, and various forms of identification (but no cash), a street map, a baseball cap and sunglasses, and an old—or new, depending on how one chose to view it—cellular phone with some . . . modifications.

Early afternoon sunlight slanted into the small, high-set windows of the basement and exalted the trash and detritus that had greeted my landing. Dust motes from that had been disturbed by my arrival swirled and eddied like golden specks in that light.

I shouldered my backpack and walked toward the rickety stairs.

#

He wasn’t hard to find.

Or he wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t been . . . disoriented by all the  _people_.

At first, it wasn’t so bad, as I’d landed in the suburbs of the city, and at that time of day there weren’t many people on the street. But as I walked on and got closer to the city center, more people and more cars began to appear and I began to get distinctly uncomfortable.

By the time I reached what the map identified as the city’s commercial and cultural center, I was sweating—not from exertion—and breathing heavily. I felt jittery in my own skin and couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone I passed—and there were  _many_ , so many hundreds—was watching me and somehow knew I was . . . not of this When. That I was here to kill one of their own.

I couldn’t remember the last time, aside from childhood, back before the world had emptied, that I’d seen more than twenty different people in the course of my day—even on the busiest, most travel-prone day. Where I’m from, the world population is closer to a few hundred million, rather than the seven billion that I could have sworn I  _felt_  surrounding me. . . .

I also kept having the stunning realization that I  _was truly_  Back before the world had emptied and that I  _was_  a child, right now, in a different part of the country.

But it was that feeling of being stared at by so many that left me literally gasping by mid-afternoon. I was staggering down the street like a man having a heart attack—my recently nanite-free body was working overtime trying to regulate my breathing and heart-rate but having little luck. My fight-or-flight was off the radar and I was about to bolt pell-mell through the streets of a strange city with no other thought than getting somewhere hidden and defensible, when I noticed—across a crowded, face-filled street—a sign:

**Java Cave**.

 

It was a familiar name— _very_  familiar—in this shifting morass of people and automobiles and buildings, and I ran for it, darting across the street amidst a chorus of horns.  _Stop, look, and listen/ Before you cross the street/ Use your eyes, use your ears/And then you use your feet!_  drifted out of my inconveniently whole memory. The little rhyme was from a childhood that was happening even as I pounded across macadam toward one of the places highlighted on the map in my zippered windbreaker pocket.

The large orange and green sign, with its irregular white letters, seemed to get further away as I ran. Below the sign, there were two taken tables of patrons sitting to one side of a large picture window with an almost abstract rendering of a giant mug of steaming coffee.

_Luka loved coffee_ , I remember thinking as I ran, dodging traffic, backpack joggling against my back. People really  _were_  staring at me, now. The passersby, the outside patrons of the café, a young guy serving one of the tables.

I was nearly clipped by something large and red and  _fast_ , and I faltered and almost fell before catching myself and, with a terrific lunge, leaping out of the road.

I had made it to the sidewalk and before me was the façade of the brightly-lit café. I leaned heavily on a parking meter, huffing in breaths before just as quickly puffing them back out.

“Hey, buddy, are you okay?”

Startled, I looked up and into questioning dark grey eyes.  _Familiar_  eyes in a long, ascetic’s face, and my heart skipped a beat. Or maybe ten. My problem with breathing—and breathing itself—was forgotten.

“’Cause you don’t  _look_  okay, if you don’t mind me saying,” Aaron Blessing said to me, frowning solemnly and giving me a concerned once-over. “You  _look_  like you need to sit down. You wanna come inside and I’ll get you some water. . . ?”

“I—” I started to reply automatically, before hiccupping and covering my mouth.  _This is it! It’s him! The man behind the extinction of humanity! Snap his neck! Kill him! Kill him_ now!

My brain was screaming, my lungs were suddenly over-full, and my stomach was churning . . . I reached out weakly, and my hand hit his shoulder limply. His auburn eyebrows shot up in surprise but no fear, and then I was turning away from him, my stomach in full rebellion. I leaned over the curb to retch.

“Easy, there, buddy. Easy,” Blessing soothed worriedly, patting my back as I heaved up the little that’d been in my stomach into the gutter.

When I was done, I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand then straightened up slowly. The world before me spun and dipped lazily, and I felt weak . . . dazed.

“Feel better, now?” Blessing asked, his hand still light and comforting on my back, but no longer patting. I looked down at him—he was shorter than me, but then, I’d known that he would be from his dossier and photos: five-nine, one hundred sixty-seven pounds soaking wet—and into his eyes. The eyes of the greatest mass murderer in human history.

“I—” I said once more. Then I was shoving his hand away as I turned and ran again.

#

I spent the next eight days locked in a cheap motel room on the outskirts of the city, fighting crippling panic attacks and unable to go further than the motel’s ice and vending machines for sustenance. Not that I needed more than the bare basics to survive off of. Thanks to my conditioning, I could’ve survived on air and sunlight, if necessary.

I watched television in between attacks, because it was comforting and reminded me of being a child. Which I was . . . somewhere in America.

When television began to grate on my nerves, I turned it off and instead stared at the peeling, beige walls of my room. The hideous orange drapes that I’d drawn to keep out sunlight. The saggy, mismatched, piebald furniture that creaked whenever I put weight on it. The sticky-tacky floor tiles in particularly vomitus shades of purple and green. The occasional lethargic cockroach. . . .

I contemplated my palatial surroundings and tried not to think too much. Sometimes it worked. Most times it didn’t.

And every time I thought about the Incident—about running so unexpectedly, so easily into Aaron Blessing, and about how I’d failed in my simple mission—I would become unable to catch my breath. Time would pass while I was locked in a Hell of my own making and I wouldn’t be able to account for several hours at a time.

Had my inaction, my inability to be proactive, doomed humanity for a second time?

_No,_  I’d tell myself.  _They sent you Back years before The ‘Phage happens. You have time. Time enough._

But then I’d think of the look of concern in Blessing’s dark eyes—they had seemed, for all that he’d been labeled  _monster_  and  _world-killer_ , to be  _kind_  eyes—and start retching and shaking and even, on occasion, weeping.

And for some reason, then I’d think of Luka, and when that happened, sometimes I’d have those spans when I’d go away . . . only to return to myself hours later, curled in a ball on the creaky motel bed or huddled in a corner of the room.

This was how it was for over a week.

But by the ninth afternoon, eleven pounds lighter and still vaguely disoriented, I went to the motel’s office and among the many pamphlets and maps for sale, found a free bus map.

I had let the mission slip, true. But I felt ready, on that ninth day, to do what I hadn’t—what I  _should’ve_ —days ago.

#

“I remember you from the other day,” Blessing said when he came out to take my order.

I’d only been sitting for a minute or so before he ambled outside in his apron and with a notepad. The look of surprise in his eyes as he suddenly recognized me from the week prior struck a chord within me.

I tried on a smile that felt more like a dyspeptic grimace and wondered with almost detached fascination if I was going to throw up again. I’d become used to doing so over the past nine days, after not having done so for nearly two hundred years of my life prior.

Life without nanites was a bitch.

“Are you okay? I mean, I guess you must be. It’s been over a week, but . . . _are_  you okay?”

His concern, obvious and earnest, made my stomach clench and churn. “I’m fine. I just had a . . . panic attack, of sorts. Thank you for your concern, though. For trying to help.” I paused, then added: “I didn’t mean to take off on you like a purebred Greyhound.”

Blessing’s worried smile became a wide, unreserved grin. I thought of Luka again—Luka when we’d  _first met_ —and tried not to let my dyspeptic smile slip back into my usual frown. I forced myself to notice details about Blessing that the few photos I’d seen hadn’t managed to capture. The way his teeth were slightly crooked, but very white, as if not having been able to afford braces had made him take care of them all the more fiercely. The fact that his nose was also slightly crooked, as if it’d been broken once upon a time and not set properly. The way the stubbornness of his jaw was offset by the kindness of his grey eyes and thin, but mobile mouth. . . .

“Hey, not a problem. I know exactly how it feels when that instinct to run kicks in and—” Blessing snapped his fingers and I jumped, and stopped staring at his mouth “—you just have to  _run_. Believe me, I know.”

My stomach churned and my heart beat faster. I tried to let my conditioning control what I thought, at the time, was another fight-or-flight response to the ultimate threat Aaron Blessing posed. But I couldn’t quite calm myself.

In the meantime, silence fell between Blessing and I, in which he laughed and looked away, flushing just a little. But on his fair complexion, it was pretty visible. I found myself looking down at my table. At my hands thereon, large, calloused, and training-rough.

_Kill him,_  a small—scarily small—part of me whispered.  _Kill him, now_.

“So, I’m Aaron, I’ll be your server today . . . what can I get for you?” When I looked up, Blessing was staring resolutely down at his pad, pen at the ready. His face was still flushed.

“Um,” I said softly, once more wondering with that detached fascination what in the Hell I was doing letting Blessing talk at me instead of killing him with one fateful blow. I could look at him and catalogue all the vulnerable places on him, places where one swift, sharp strike would be enough to incapacitate and/or kill.

Catalogue, but apparently not make use of. Not yet.

Perhaps . . . not in public. I had to find some way to lure him to someplace hidden. Someplace I could commit a murder and get away with it. I had to lure him away from  _his_  safety zone and into  _mine_  . . . but how?

This had not been covered in my training. All that had been drummed into me had been ways to keep my mission simple. Now, here I was fighting that very conditioning and making everything complicated because of no better reason than the way he blushed.

I squarely met his as-yet-innocent dark eyes. Blessing’s grin faltered and those eyes widened, as if he was experiencing his own fight-or-flight reflex. I felt my body coil in response, ready to leap should he try to make a run for it. I didn’t know what had given me away and didn’t care, but I was ready, now, public be damned, to end Blessing as expediently as possible. . . .

But then, instead of backing away or simply turning to run, Blessing smiled at me, that flush spread across his face again, bright enough to read by on a dark night, and I . . . suddenly understood. I added two and two together and got a number as perplexing as it was horrifying. “We’ve, uh, got some really great specials going on today . . . are you in the mood for coffee, or tea—or maybe cocoa? It’s definitely a hot cocoa kinda day,” he laughed a bit, still looking down at his pad. When he snuck a glance up at me, his pupils were wide and dilated, and my suspicions were confirmed. “We’ve also got soup and sandwiches—”

“I have to go,” I said and stood up.

“Well, have a nice day,” Blessing called as I walked swiftly away.

#

Two days later found me back at the  _Java Cave_.

I stood stiffly in front of the picture window, looking in till I caught Blessing’s eye. When he saw me, he looked surprised, but then smiled and finished up with his customer and came outside.

“Hello, again,” he said, seeming amused, and I smiled uncomfortably.

“Hi.”

He gestured at the tables. “Gonna have a seat and let me bring you a cuppa Joe, or are you gonna dash off again?”

I let my body answer for me, and sat. And Blessing grinned.

#

“Um. I guess I’ll have a coffee, black.”

“Really? No cream or sugar?”

“No . . . why?”

“I had you pegged for a cream-and-sugar man.”

“A—why?”

“No reason. Small, medium, or large?”

#

“Say, do you like scones?”

“Uh. I don’t know. I’ve never had one.”

“What?  _Never_?”

“Never.”

“Well.” Pause. “Well. Today might be the day to try one. Are you hungry?”

“I—”

“I’d say from the sound your stomach just made, you’re  _starving_. Lemme get you a pumpkin-spice scone to go with that cuppa Joe. On the house.”

“But—”

“I promise you’ll  _love_  it.”

#

“Chilly out, today. Pretty soon, we’re gonna probably bring the tables in for the winter.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Don’t look so blue! I promise the inside of the café’s almost as nice as the outside. And definitely  _warmer_.”

“I dunno . . . I sorta like the chill.”

“Hmm. Well, it certainly gives people a great excuse to find interesting ways to keep warm.”

“Like coffee and pumpkin scones?”

“Among other things.”

#

“Can I ask you a question?”

“I guess. . . .”

“What’s your name? I mean, I’ve been wondering for the past few weeks. And I can’t keep calling you  _Mr. Coffee-Black-and-Pumpkin-Scone_ , can I?”

“You can, if you like. It doesn’t bother me.”

“This is what I like about you, Mr. Coffee-Black-and-Pumpkin-Scone: my sarcasm rolls right off you.”

“What would  _you guess_  my name is?”

“Hmm . . . I dunno. Maybe . . .  _Rory_?” 

“Uh. No.”

“You  _look_  like a  _Rory_.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

“I dunno, something about you is giving me a fairly strong  _Rory_ -vibe.”

“I assure you my name isn’t  _Rory_.”

“Well, if it’s not, then what  _is_  it?”

_Long_  pause. “Andrew.”

“Pleased tameetcha, Andrew.”

Another long pause. “Likewise, Aaron.”

#

“See ya later, Andrew.”

“Ditto, Aaron.”

“Say. . . .”

“Yes?”

“Do you like slam-poetry?”

“I . . . don’t know. Never heard any. Why?”

“Because there’s a slam happening here, tonight around seven, and they’re usually really cool. I was thinking if you’re at loose ends tonight, you might . . . come check it out.”

“Oh. I . . . dunno. Poetry’s not my thing. . . .”

“I mean, I’ll be here with some friends after shift, so there’ll be someone here you know. . . .”

“I’ll . . . think about it. See ya later.”

“Later.”

#

“Well, well . . . you made it!”

“Yeah . . . I don’t really feel like I fit in, though.”

“No one here does—that’s what makes it so great!” A bright laugh. “C’mon, Andrew, my friends and I are sitting over there. They’ve been bugging me about whether you might show up.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“You told your friends about me?”

“Um . . . yeah.” Another laugh, this one slightly nervous. “Just that another friend they don’t know yet might be showing up. One I thought they’d like.”

“Are we?”

“Huh?”

“Friends. Are we friends?”

An oblique glance. “Here’s where I’d normally be tempted to flirt with you shamelessly. But I won’t.”

“You  _won’t_?”

“In the interests of not scaring you off.” A brief pause. “ _Have_  I scared you off, Andrew?”

“You don’t see me running away.”

“No, I don’t.” A brilliant smile. “C’mon, before my friends die of suspense.”

#

“Thanks again for the lift.”

Silence, as the engine was shut off. “Anytime, Andrew.”

Silence. Then: “Look, I dunno if you—”

“Maybe I should—”

“I’m sorry—”

“No,  _I’m_  sorry. What were you gonna say?”

“I, uh . . . was gonna invite you in. I mean, it’s not much. Just like any other motel room. But if you want, we could . . . I dunno. Talk.”

Silence again. Then: “I’d love to come in, Andrew.”

#

As soon as the door closed behind Blessing, The Plan—which had taken weeks of patience and grooming of Blessing—began to fall apart.

When the door closed, Blessing looked at me, blushing and smiling nervously, and in that moment, he became  _Aaron_  in my mind. Not just  _Blessing_  or  _Project Blessing._  He became this guy I’d been courting—for lack of a better word—for the past eight weeks, and whose friends I’d met, whose taste in poetry I now knew well from having attended several slams with him—one in which he’d even read his own work.

And even though all of it—the poetry slams, letting him drive me back to my motel, the continued trips to the  _Java Cave_ , and only when I knew he’d be on shift—was just a means to an end, I suddenly couldn’t look at him objectively anymore. Couldn’t look at him and see the life I’d been sent to still. The mass-murderer I’d been sent to stop.

I could only see . . .  _Aaron_. . . .

See those dark grey eyes as they got closer to me . . . smell the pervasive scent of coffee on him . . . feel the clothing-muffled heat of his body as it pressed against mine and his cool hands as they cupped my face . . . taste the mint tea-sweetness of his lips when they pressed mine, then coaxed them open . . . hear the way his breathing hitched as I wrapped my arms around him and kissed him hungrily. . . .

I didn’t know what I was doing.

I didn’t care.

It was as if a yawning chasm had opened within me, a gaping maw of loneliness and need, and it was imperative that I fill it with everything I’d been missing since Luka—

I firmly pushed Luka away, not for the first time. It wasn’t hard. I’d had nearly half a century of practice.

Aaron’s hands settled on my hips and he pulled me closer, till I was flush against him. He was hard, and not shy about that fact. But then, neither was I.

“I want you more than anyone I’ve ever known,” he admitted on my lips, one hand sliding tentatively around to my ass. Then he was sucking a hickey into my neck and I was moaning almost helplessly. A soft, stuttered: “ _Fuck_ ,” escaped my lips when Aaron squeezed my ass  _hard._  

I began backing us toward the creaky motel bed.

#

The next morning I woke up suddenly, completely aware, as I have every day of my life since The ‘Phage caught up to my corner of America. My mind was clear and for the first time in almost fifty years my heart was full.

Spooned up behind me, holding me and snoring, Aaron Blessing slept on, his breath warm on my nape.

I turned under his arm until I was facing him, and watched him sleep.

He looked so innocent—and he was—just a college student struggling to pay for his education and still make ends meet. His face wasn’t a face I hated and feared, any longer. He wasn’t my nemesis. He wasn’t  _world-killer_ , anymore. He was simply . . .  _Aaron_.

And I couldn’t stop touching his face.

Whatever his reasons for releasing The ‘Phage on mankind . . . I couldn’t believe them to be evil ones. Misguided, perhaps, but not evil. The nanites had, after all, made those of us who’d survived the initial infection close to immortal and nearly invincible. As well as irreversibly sterile. But it’s entirely _possible_ that Aaron hadn’t intended that last part. It was _entirely_ possible he had only _intended_ to make humanity better, stronger, and happier.

He had tried to plan for every conceivable outcome—don’t we all?—and failed. And I knew how that song went.

Knowing what I now knew of him, I was certain his intentions were pure. He was an idealist and an optimist. He saw only the best in people and situations. Or tried to, anyway. He ignored the downsides he didn’t like and clung desperately to his sunny skies and rainbows.

The way he was clinging to  _me_ , now.

Suddenly I was certain that with proper . . . guidance and yes, manipulation, he could be steered away from any research into nanotech. I had gathered that at this point in his college career he was choosing from several different options. And even just a little  _nudge_  in a different direction—even one from a lover? Friend-with-benefits? Random guy he’d fucked?—might be enough to alter the course of human history. I didn’t know what I was to him, or what, if anything, _last night_ had meant to him, but I knew what it meant to  _me_.

I knew I had to _try_.

Easing out from under his arm and out of bed, I got dressed quickly and quietly. I let myself out of the room just as my stomach began to growl, and stepped into the cold, overcast morning. Directly across from the motel parking lot was a twenty-four-hour diner that made waffles like I hadn’t had since I was a kid.

I wasn’t equipped to  _make_  Aaron breakfast, but I supposed he’d appreciate the gesture, nonetheless.

And while I waited for breakfast, I would think more on how to stop The ‘Phage without killing Aaron. I was certain I could do it. I was certain that I could save the world and Aaron in one fell swoop if I could just figure it all out. Figure out what could’ve have made such an unassuming young man set out to make humanity over into impervious, deathless freaks . . . and stop it.

And so, I didn’t notice the car speeding unsteadily toward me, until it was entirely too late to do anything but  _understand_.

See, we’d never  _understood_  Aaron Blessing’s motivations. Hadn’t had anything so useful as a psychological profile to tell us what could prompt  _him_ , of all people, to kill the world while trying, ostensibly, to save it. We’d never understood, and thought we never would.

But as that car bore down on me,  _I_  understood. I knew not only Aaron’s motivating factor, but that I’d let my mission slip not just a little, but disastrously. I knew, in one final, white-hot second, the true scope of my failure and the price mankind would pay for it. I knew that despite what the Institute had theorized, time was, indeed, a fixed phenomenon, and that one couldn’t change it, only serve its ends.

I knew all that, and knew it was too late. Too late to tell Aaron that letting heartbreak rule you is a folly none can afford. That we can’t let loss, even so catastrophic a loss as  _love_ , make us over into automatons. Or monsters.

Or gods.

We can’t—

END

 

**Author's Note:**

> My first work published as part of an anthology. What's the verdict, peeps?
> 
> Also, come chat with me on [The Tumbles](http://beetle-ships-it-all.tumblr.com).


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